


sit in & watch the sunlight fade

by trustmeimthe



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aging, Established Relationship, Grief, M/M, Miscommunication, PTSD, War is Hell kids, temari and kankuro are there for an instant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-19 10:54:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22009840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trustmeimthe/pseuds/trustmeimthe
Summary: it isn’t until he realizes that he’s old that gaara starts thinking about what he hasn’t had.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 5
Kudos: 76





	sit in & watch the sunlight fade

**Author's Note:**

  * For [a_gay_poster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/gifts).



> my wife [a_gay_poster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster) set up the gaalee holiday exchange and deadass informed me that she didn't sign herself up to receive a gift. that is bonkers. i haven't written for naruto in a decade and quit following it ages ago but gaalee is still good so here is a weirdly melancholy story about ninjas.
> 
> title is from [no plan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXq_J29V5Io) by hozier.

It isn’t until he realizes that he’s old that Gaara starts thinking about what he hasn’t had.

Old, of course, being 40. His birthday hits and passes before he has a chance to recognize that it’s occurred, leaving him disoriented and confused. It feels as though his brain’s been knocked a little bit loose, is not longer quite connected to the inside of his skull. There aren’t many people around to ask whether this is normal, but he tries anyway.

“Yeah, that totally happened to me,” Kankuro complains, leaning back in his chair so far he almost topples backwards onto the floor. “I got depressed for a _while_. Forty’s old as hell. I don’t wanna be old, you know? I always figured we’d die young.”

Temari tells him firmly that no such thing happened to her and changes the subject.

He knows long before he asks that seeking insight from Lee is a lost cause. He asks anyway and gets the response he expected: an extended and enthusiastic speech about keeping fit as one ages in order to prolong the suppleness of limb and lungs. Succumbing to the inevitable, he allows himself to be distracted. At least for a while.

“Do you think this is normal?” he manages to interject, somewhere in the middle of a mini-lecture on how to treat your hamstrings as they deserve to be treated. “To be . . .” And he hesitates, because he isn’t sure what he means. Relieved? Anxious? Neither? Both? What is the word for what he feels to be alive in this moment, and after all this time?

“Oh, absolutely!” Lee says brightly, and for a moment Gaara feels himself relax, let out an exhale after a long-held breath, until: “There is an inevitable decline of one’s physical fitness with age! But that’s no reason to be discouraged! Just because it’s typical doesn’t mean _we_ have to be. You never have been, anyway!”

Quietly, Gaara sips his tea and says nothing further.

\--

A little while after his forty-first birthday, he visits Konoha. It’s for political reasons, mostly, although his duties are concluded remarkably quickly. He has free time and (unsurprisingly) no idea what to do with it. As he steps out of the board room and into the streets, meanders mentally down one road and up another, trying to decide where to go, he thinks about what Konoha would look like if it weren’t Konoha.

What does that mean? Even he doesn’t know. What would the whole world look like if it had known more peace? What would their lives have been?

It’s foolishness. He shakes his head.

It’s almost audible, the moment the clouds break and begin to release snow on the village’s rooftops. He can certainly feel it on his skin, taste it in his breath. He’s used to this cold, but not cold _and_ precipitation. In this moment, it feels exhausting, and not only because time is catching up to him. Or whatever.

Lee’s hand claps down on his shoulder out of nowhere. Even after all this time, he flinches slightly.

“Sorry!” Lee says, a little too loud, like he always does.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs in reply, like he always does. Because it is. It always is.

“Do you want to come home with me?” booms Lee, and then blinks slowly, mouth forming words with moderate caution. “Since it’s cold?” Which means _I’ve missed you, and you’ve been busy, but I already found out you’re not anymore, so why waste time?_

There’s the curve of a smile, or at least the implication of one, on Gaara’s lips. He just nods and leans into the warmth of Lee’s smile. Even in another world, he thinks, Lee’s smile would be the same. Bright, warm.

Maybe brighter. Maybe warmer.

\--

Lee’s apartment is the same as it always is: cozy and a little cluttered, reminiscent of a rabbit’s warren in its comfortable claustrophobia. Gaara’s gotten used to it, certainly, but part of him always thinks wistfully as he enters of clear open skies and the emptiness of desert.

Ushered onto the overstuffed couch, he shakes melting snowflakes out of his hair and curls his now-bare feet up under him. Lee sets a blanket around his shoulders and over his lap, which makes him roll his eyes, but he knew it was coming. Habit is comforting. This kind of habit especially, the kind that has nothing to do with life or death, either his own or his people’s.

He picks at the blanket as Lee chatters about nothing much at all, buzzing about the weather and the gossip and what his former teammates and teacher are up to. There’s an interesting piece in there somewhere about how, back in spring, Lee found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and nursed it back to health. All of this had been relayed in letters, of course -- no way Lee could keep that to himself for days, let alone months -- but it’s important, clearly, that Gaara get the in-person blow-by-blow of nurturing the tiny creature. Watching Lee gesture animatedly and imitate the little bird’s demanding calls for food, he finds himself feeling pinched and strange again, like something isn’t quite aligning how it should be.

Of course, he doesn’t interrupt the story. Just listens, drinks his tea, and tries to keep still. To focus on Lee’s voice and the warmth of ceramic under his cold fingers. And Lee catches him, of course. Of course he does.

“Gaara?” Voice soft like it only ever is when he’s worried. When he’s Concerned with a capital C. It leaves Gaara sighing, tired and with the blooming pressure spot between his eyes that whispers of a future migraine.

He just shakes his head. This doesn’t cut it. More seriously: “ _Gaara_. What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

Sick? He’s--

“Just confused,” he mumbles, and traces the shape of the mug handle with scarred fingers. He wants to ask something, but he doesn’t know what. After wrestling with his own mind for a few moments, something falls out of his mouth. A question, but one that makes no sense. “If you weren’t a ninja -- what do you think you would do?”

Lee’s expression goes strange. Not quite dark, not quite hurt, but ready to be both should the conversation go in a direction he isn’t comfortable with. He tries to smooth it out, but it’s too late; Gaara’s seen it already and let himself retreat behind a glassy non-expression.

They’re quiet for a while. The silence is broken when Lee says what they both know he’s thinking: “I never wanted to be anything else.”

“I know,” Gaara interjects quickly, now that it’s out in the open. “I know _that_. I meant, if -- if we were somewhere that there was no need for ninja. Where you didn’t . . . start training so young. If that exists, somewhere. I think -- somewhere, it does.”

It must. He ducks his chin into his chest, stubborn and silent. Somewhere, all children are children. Somewhere, reaching forty isn’t a victory. He does know that. Somehow. He can feel it, a certainty itching at the back of his mind, just present enough to be memorable. To be irritating.

He picks at the blanket, a loose thread coming looser under his angry nails. The only sound in the room is Lee’s breathing and the softness of snow landing, an un-sound. Everything is muffled and too loud all at once. Maybe his mind really has come undone after all. It isn’t something people think about. Maybe sanity, like old age, is a difficult concept to grasp.

“A teacher.”

Gaara blinks. Looks up. At Lee, who is looking at him, dark eyes unreadable, deep and focused, the way so few people see them. So many people look at Lee and see what’s easy to see and leave it there. They don’t know.

“A teacher?” he echoes, going for encouragement, for interest, and ending up somewhere closer to awkward.

“Yes.” Lee nods. “I don’t know what kind, what I’d teach or anything like that . . . But I think I’d want to teach. I like helping people learn.”

It’s an interesting thought. Gaara tries to imagine Lee in different sorts of teaching positions. Some don’t fit -- a traditional school environment, maybe not -- but Lee _is_ good at showing people how to do things without making them feel like they’re stupid for not getting it. He’s patient and empathetic and as quick with praise as with corrections.

It fits, Gaara decides after his moment of quiet. Yes, that fits. That . . . could be a different kind of life for Lee, in another universe.

“What about you?” Lee asks, a question that shouldn’t be as surprising as it is. It _shouldn’t_ catch Gaara like a rabbit in a snake’s stare, but it does.

He panics and stays silent, picking at the blanket, clutching white-knuckled to his tea. The silence settles again, heavy and muffled as the snow builds outside. There is no clock ticking, but he imagines one in his mind, and each second that passes by burns like a brand.

Because he doesn’t know. He can imagine a world where people live long and peaceful lives, but he can’t see himself in it. There wouldn’t be a place for him there. So he shouldn’t have brought it up, maybe, but--

If Lee didn’t understand, wouldn’t listen, told him to stop thinking about it or that it was a silly idea, he might have been able to let it go. Except that didn’t happen. Lee stepped into that theoretical other world and is holding out his hand now to pull Gaara along, into this place he doesn’t fit.

It shouldn’t matter. It’s only a thought exercise. But something is clamping tight and hard against the inside of his ribs. The pressure hurts.

He waits for Lee to ask him: _Are you unhappy?_ It’s the natural question. He wonders it himself. But what comes instead, calm and thoughtful, is . . .

“I think you might be a teacher, too.”

_A teacher?_ “Me?” His brow furrows, gaze shifting from the blanket to Lee’s face without his permission. The why doesn’t need to be vocalized. It just is. It’s just obvious. He’d be awful at that.

“You’re kinder than you think you are.” Lee’s got that look on his face, that stubborn I-won’t-change-my-mind-so-don’t-bother-arguing determination. It’s the same as it’s always been, but with more emphasis now as age lines begin to make themselves known.

Gaara shakes his head. “Teaching takes more than just kindness. That’s the least of it.”

And Lee nods -- boisterous and too loud for the small space, in a way that echoes off the walls. “I know that! You’ve got the rest of what you need, too!”

Gaara closes his eyes and breathes the noise in, as he does in moments like these, when what Lee says is too big or too plain, a massive twisting thing that reads logical from the other side but to him, to Gaara, is as opaque as a sandstorm.

The trouble is that he believes it. Lack of evidence crumbles under the weight of such certainty. The cooling ceramic under his palms is less real than the theoretical reality Lee has presented to him in just a couple of sentences. Somewhere out there, they could be other people together, living other lives. Teaching, or whatever. Being what they are, but in a different way.

When he opens his eyes, Lee is smiling at him, soft and bright at the same time in that way that he has. He feels the sun beating down on him, beyond the roof and the snow and the clouds. From the other side of the earth, the sun touches him when Lee smiles at him that way.

“I’d like to stay a while,” he manages, voice rough with nothing much at all. “Extend . . . my visit.”

The sun brightens, and Lee nods with a brightly affirmative sound, a bell ringing clean and crisp, scooting just a little bit closer. “Stay as long as you want.”


End file.
